FILE - In this May 16, 2012 file photo, the Facebook logo is displayed on an iPad in Philadelphia.

Matt Rourke, Associated Press - Ap

Facebook read daily more than Bible

Article by: SETH BORENSTEIN

Associated Press

February 4, 2014 - 1:23 PM

WASHINGTON — Facebook's numbers are epic. More Americans check Facebook daily than read the Bible and it has more monthly users worldwide than most continents have people.

Facebook, which celebrates its 10th anniversary Tuesday, says worldwide it has 757 million daily active users. Of those 19 percent are in the U.S. and Canada, so that's more than 143 million people checking Facebook daily.

The Bible used to be the go-to for statistics about reading, pre-digital age. A 2006 CBS News poll found 15 percent of U.S. adults read the Bible or other religious texts daily. There are about 267 million adults in the U.S. and Canada. That means about 40 million people reading the Bible daily.

And then there are monthly users — Facebook claims 1.23 billion of them. That's more people than live in any country but China. In fact, Facebook is beyond comparing to nations and is more continental in magnitude. Facebook's monthly user population is larger than six of the seven continents, only behind Asia.

Facebook's monthly user total is about the population of all of North America and Europe combined.

But all those numbers pale behind this one factoid from Facebook: About 400 billion photos have been shared on Facebook.

That's lots of selfies.

If you printed them out four to a page on regular-sized sheets of paper and put the 100 billion sheets end to end, they would stretch for about 17 million miles. That's enough snapshots to reach to the moon and back 34 times.

And it all started ten years ago in a dorm room.

Go Figure, an occasional feature from The Associated Press, explores the news through numbers and what they mean.